I honestly don't know either if cross-play will be possible. Surely, it always looks good on paper and when you say it, but once you give it a reality check you'll see that it's not just a question of engineering. For example - despite the engineering challenge - Age1DE couldn't have crossplay with Age1 because Age1DE players would have an unfair advantage. And I think that could be the case for the other DEs as well. That neither means that I dislike the idea of cross-play nor that I think it would hurt sales. If you're truly concerned that cross-play wouldn't attract many buyers, then the much bigger issue might actually be the lack of appeal of the entire product.

It costs moni to make too, ja? And market? And sustain? RTS ded genre, and take long time to make, and afaik the DE they have already put out did zilch to rejuvenate its player base or interest, especially awkwardly being not on steam. I don't think it went how they wanted it to go, I don't think the response (and the follow up responses) to the original DE and AOE4 announcements went how they wanted it to go, and it just feels like any steam that was there just isn't any more. We've heard nothing from Microshoot.

Cross platform actually makes sense for me. Why would they ignore the steam players which they need for a player base? Surely they dont just hope we are all going to swap to Microsoft Store. Lets face it, these DEs are not going to attract 500k new players, it’s going to be mostly the already active but small community. More than AoE1 though, which was too obsolete to begin with, and this is why I wouldnt read too much into the allegedly low AoE1DE sales. AoE2 and 3 already have active player bases though, cant compare wth 1 which was nowhere to be found. And now it’s a good opportunity to fix the bugs on the Steam version, there wasnt any reason until now. I mean they are going to fix them anyway for the DE version, so why not apply the same code changes to Steam, after all DEs are running on the very same code (as a foundation), only the textures they load differ.

Mitoe wrote:I feel like it's unlikely that they will release the game on Steam.

Maybe the 'experiment' with aoe1HD has opened their eyes with regards to the windows store? I always feel like microsoft seems to have some form of alterior motives with all this stuff. Maybe one of those was pushing the windows store, however they might have realized that steam can't be touched. It could also be they'd like to experiment with releasing a game on multiple platforms.

@momuuu don’t underestimate Microsoft’s incompetence. That company can hardly tell right from left sometimes.

@Ting, sorry but I don’t see that happening. Not only would that ruin the point of releasing DE in the first place, but I doubt that anyone currently working at Microsoft knows how to push any updates for the game through the existing system.

Possibly the only redeeming factors are that the graphics/UI do look quite good, but it's just not enough when everything else is a mess (and even there, some key animations and models are missing from the game).

Although Microsoft does not reveal player numbers, one can simply log into the multiplayer (well, if the game is functional at all for them) and witness how above points affect the number of active lobbies. From that, it is apparent the game was dead-on-arrival™ and likely did not sell very well. It is uncertain whether Microsoft broke even on the development costs, and the game serves as more of a deterrent to further purchases of the upcoming titles.